The Wall Street Journal reports that the Department of Defense has formalized its doctrine for responding to cyber-attacks. (Hat tip: Thinh Nguyen.) Unsurprisingly, the Pentagon has adopted a pragmatic posture of equivalence: cyber-attacks of sufficient impact could meet with a kinetic response. In other words, logic bombs might prompt America to employ real ones. The […]

Normally, bloviating about security follows a simple rule: disagreeing with Bruce Schneier = wrong. But I do disagree with Bruce about the recent decision by security researcher Dillon Beresford to withhold details about a vulnerability he discovered in Siemens’ SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition Systems) controllers. These are the same type of systems that […]

I’m here at Eric Goldman and Dan Hunter‘s great Works-in-Progress in Internet Law conference at Santa Clara Law. My talk is about my cybersecurity paper, Conundrum, which I’ll be posting to SSRN after incorporating feedback from the confab. I’m looking forward to David Opderbeck‘s piece as well, and just learned a lot about data anonymization […]

Note: I forgot to mention that the piece is coming out this spring in the Wake Forest Journal of Law & Policy. Thanks to Jim Bauer and his team for their hard work on it! (Updated 15 Feb. 2011.) Hat tip: to Larry Solum and Josie Brown for linking to the piece on their blogs. […]

Works in more places… I suppose the fake place name would be NSFrancisPying. (Hat tip to an anonymous friend!) The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the Sixth Circuit’s ruling that the plaintiffs in the NSA suit here in Michigan lacked standing. The hard part, of course, is it’s extremely difficult to prove […]

Robert O’Harrow, a Washington Post reporter who is very insightful and current in his coverage of data privacy (and author of a good book on it too), today chronicles the inevitable first stirrings of government fear about virtual worlds such as Second Life: Intelligence officials who have examined these systems say they’re convinced that the […]

The Washington Post has published a powerful op-ed piece by the anonymous recipient of one of the FBI’s national security letters, who is prohibited by law from disclosing even the fact that he received one. National security letters (or “NSLs”) are the demands for information, issued without any requirement of judicial approval, that were the […]

Activists and policy wonks who work with environmental issues take it for granted that private corporate activities and markets lie at the center of both the problems and the potential solutions (like this and this) to issues such as water pollution, global warming, and habitat destruction. Organizations like Ceres work with businesses to help them […]